


a madness shared by two

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-08
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2017-12-22 19:53:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/917395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This can’t be right. Absolutely can’t be. Because the Doctor is one-hundred-percent certain that he would remember shagging Rose Tyler. And he doesn’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The Doctor wakes up in a bed he doesn’t recognize.  
  
That’s not really what throws him, though. Even if the unfamiliar location is a little disconcerting, he’s woken up in far, far stranger places than a comfortable bed with soft sheets and plush pillows. At this point, if he wakes up in an unfamiliar place that _isn’t_ immediately identifiable as a prison cell or a laboratory (of the evil persuasion), the Doctor generally counts it as a win.  
  
No, what really throws him is the fact that he’s _waking up_ at all. He’d slept for a few hours just two days ago, and he shouldn’t have needed to sleep again so soon. And yet he’s definitely been sleeping. As far as he can tell, he hasn’t been drugged, or knocked out, or subject to any of the plethora of unpleasant things which can induce unconsciousness in a Time Lord. There’s nothing foreign lingering in his system, no chemical aftertaste in his mouth, no residual pain from a physical altercation. There’s just the familiar sensation of his brain kicking back into gear after a period of rest, along with the ache of his muscles protesting when he starts to move towards getting up and out of the strange bed. And – _well._ That’s…different.  
  
  He doesn’t usually sleep naked.  
  
After a few beats of groggy confusion, the Doctor pulls himself up from his prone position on the bed, the better to take in his unfamiliar surroundings. Unfortunately, those surroundings really only help to multiply the confusion a hundred-fold.  
  
The first thing he realizes is that he’s on the TARDIS.  
  
Honestly, it really shouldn’t have taken him this long to come to that conclusion. There simply aren’t any other beds in the universe as comfortable as the beds on the TARDIS, and the soft omnipresent hum of the ship is a dead giveaway – a constant, comforting background noise that you just can’t find anywhere else.  
  
His mental connection with the old girl does seem a bit off, though – dim or distant, the way it is when they’re separated or when there’s something wrong with her. The Doctor makes a note to run a multi-system diagnostic, to see if he can figure out what’s wrong.  
  
First, though – pants. And trousers. Clothes are going to be a necessity, if he’s going to be leaving this room to do anything.  
  
As he maneuvers himself out of bed, the mystery of _where_ exactly on the TARDIS he is begins to deepen. There are plenty of places on the ship that he visits very rarely, and a few that he considers permanently closed, even if they are technically still accessible. Susan and Romana’s old rooms, for example. But there are very few places that he has legitimately never seen.  
  
This room, apparently, is one of them.  
  
He can’t imagine _why_ , though. It looks like any old bedroom, though it’s nothing like the plain, utilitarian sleeping quarters he calls his own but hardly ever uses. When he _does_ sleep, more often than not it’s in the jump seat or on a couch in the library. It doesn’t look like Rose’s room, either, which last he checked was much smaller than this one, and much more…pink.  
  
That said, this is a room that looks lived in – and as there’s no one else living on the TARDIS apart from him and Rose, the Doctor is really quite baffled. There is a pair of dirty trainers on the side of the bed, and a stack of books on one bedside table. The door to the ensuite is slightly ajar, and the Doctor can see that the bathroom counter is cluttered with toiletries and personal belongings.  
  
As he gets out of the bed to begin hunting down some clothes, it becomes clear that the floor is a bit of a mess. There are haphazard piles of clothes strewn about – jeans and a jumper here, socks and and a hoodie there. He finds his suit trousers and pants in a a heap near the foot of the bed, half-hidden underneath a maroon dressing gown, and pulls them on even as he winces at how wrinkled they’ve become while crumpled up there on the floor.  
  
He’s about to resume the search and look for a shirt when he sees that – _oh._  
  
There are knickers on the floor. Ladies’ knickers. Small, pink, lacy ladies’ knickers, resting on top of what looks to be – well.  
  
That looks an awful lot like his suit jacket.  
  
The Doctor steadfastly refuses to draw any conclusions just now, even as the combination of his nudity, the bits of clothing scattered all around the room, and an upsetting lack of short-term memory begins to coalesce into a very distressing picture. Instead, he leaves the suit jacket where it is. Then he picks up the discarded dressing gown, cinches it tight around his waist, and goes in search of Rose.  
  
—-  
  
He finds her in the kitchen.  
  
Rose is sitting on one of the counters, holding a mug of tea in one hand and what looks like a trashy Hyrpaxian magazine in the other, with the cover folded back around for easy one-handed reading. She looks up from it when he walks in, though, and he’s a bit puzzled to see her face fall a little at the sight of him, brows furrowing together in displeasure.  
  
“What? What’s wrong?” he asks, reflexively, because that expression of disappointment is one that simply can’t be allowed to stay on Rose Tyler’s face for long. “Have I got something on my face? Or in my hair?” One hand flies up towards his head in alarm.  
  
Rose brightens a bit at that, disappointment apparently fading into amusement at his flailing. She graces him with a tongue-touched smile. “You’re fine. ‘S just a shame you put clothes on, is all.” Rose gives a little half-shrug, and then winks – _winks_ – at him, before going back to her magazine.  
  
Somehow, the Doctor hasn’t noticed until just then that Rose is wearing very, very little clothing. In fact, all she appears to have on is a blue oxford – an oxford very like the one he couldn’t find in the mystery bedroom, that looks _very_ much like it might have come from one of his own ensembles – and a pair of white cotton knickers.  
  
He’s momentarily paralyzed by the sight of Rose’s bare legs, dangling off the counter and crossed at the ankles.  
  
“Rose?” Her name, spoken as a question, comes out quite a lot more high-pitched than the Doctor would’ve liked. Rose, however, doesn’t even look up from her magazine – just makes an _mmmm_ sound in answer, waiting for the rest of his question. “What–” The Doctor makes a concerted effort to take the squeak out of his voice. “What did we do last night?”  
  
That makes Rose look up from her magazine. “What do you mean?” she asks, eyes narrowing slightly.  
  
“Oh, erm – my head’s just a little fuzzy, is all.” The Doctor quickly backpedals, grasping for an excuse that will allow him to fill in the apparently quite considerable gap in his memory – a gap that has led to naked sleeping in unfamiliar beds and suggestive comments over breakfast and half-naked Rose Tylers on his kitchen counters. “Too much sleep. Not good for Time Lord brains.”  
  
Rose gives him a dubious look – and he can’t blame her, as it’s a terrible, transparent excuse – but she answers him anyways. “Same old, same old. Nearly got executed on Melaros V. Stopped a military coup. Left – _before_ the ball in our honor, for which you owe me, as I was promised a party.” Just then, the toaster next to her on the counter dings softly, producing a slice of perfectly browned toast. Rose puts down her magazine and hops off the counter, then extricates the piece of bread from the toaster. “Came back to the TARDIS. Got cleaned up.” She takes a bite of the toast, then speaks around it to finish her summary. “Then we shagged and went to bed.”  
  
The Doctor has to try very, very hard not to visibly gape at her. “What?”  
  
Rose sedately takes another bite of toast and looks at him like he’s just dribbled on his shirt. “What do you mean, what? Improbable adventures, running for our lives, shagging afterwards. Same as always.”  
  
 _“What?”_  
  
Rose finishes her piece of toast with one particularly large bite, then quirks an eyebrow at him.  
  
This can’t be right. Absolutely can’t be. Because the Doctor is one-hundred-percent certain that he would remember shagging Rose Tyler. And he doesn’t.  
  
Especially not _more than once_ , or on a _regular basis_ , at least one of which seems to be the implication here.  
  
Rose licks the fingers of the hand that had been holding her toast, presumably to clean them of any crumbs left behind. The Doctor makes a very undignified noise.  
  
“Is something wrong?” Rose is still looking at him like he’s slow. “You’re acting a bit strange, Doctor.”  
  
He shakes his head vigorously, because _he_ is not the one acting strangely here, he’s quite certain. “No, no, I’m just – fuzzy. From the sleep, you know.”  
  
Rose puts her mug back down on the counter, next to the abandoned magazine, before stretching her arms above her head. The motion makes the oxford she’s wearing ride up a bit, and the Doctor finds himself once again transfixed by the sight of so much bare skin on display.  
  
Then she’s crossing the room, heading towards where he’s been standing in the doorway this entire time. “You sure you’re all right?” There’s genuine concern in her voice, and it goes a little ways towards soothing the panic that’s creeping up his spine.  
  
The Doctor nods mutely, unable to summon up a verbal response in the face of _Rose,_ half-dressed and so very, very close to him, a vision pulled straight from the fantasies he wasn’t ever planning to admit to. Her eyes are wide and brown and _lovely_ and getting closer, for some reason.  
  
 _Oh._  
  
Rose is kissing him.  
  
Her lips are warm and welcoming and so, so _soft_ , and the sensation is so novel, so _wonderful_ , that it takes the a moment for the Doctor to register exactly what’s happening.  
  
He ought to stop her. He ought to bring his hands up to her shoulders and push her away, ought to stop this before it goes any further, because he doesn’t remember Melaros V or a military coup, and he certainly doesn’t remember shagging, of any kind, _ever_ , not with Rose.  
  
Well. He remembers _imagining_ it. He does not, however, remember it actually _happening._  
  
All of those concerns seem to have fallen by the wayside at the moment, though. Because his hands are grasping at Rose’s hips, pulling her closer rather than pushing her away, and his lips are giving into the pressure of hers, opening and deepening the kiss as she hums contentedly into his mouth.  
  
But then _she’s_ pulling away. The Doctor makes a sub-vocal noise of hearty disapproval. “I’m going to take a shower,” she says, with a grin. “You’re welcome to join me.”  
  
Rose steps away from him and starts padding down the corridor, and he can’t help but stare dazedly at her while she walks away.  
  
Then the world sort of – _wobbles_.  
  
It feels like the whole universe is a snowglobe being shaken, and he’s the plastic figurine trapped inside. Rose’s retreating form blurs and goes cloudy before fading out of existence altogether, and the Doctor finds himself having to close his eyes against the dizzying sensation of everything _shifting_ around him.  
  
When he opens them again, he’s no longer standing in the kitchen doorway, wearing wrinkled trousers and a hideous maroon dressing gown. Instead he’s fully dressed in his brown pinstriped suit, standing in front of the TARDIS console, with one hand on the zigzag plotter – halfway through setting a course to a destination that he can’t remember deciding on.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s official, Rose has decided. The Doctor is acting  _odd._

That’s not quite the right turn of phrase, of course. The Doctor  _is_  odd. It’s part of what makes him the Doctor. But lately, it’s as though every once in a while he’s…not quite himself. Sometimes he just seems a little confused, wandering through the world like he’s groggy from sleep — like that morning last month, when he’d stumbled into the kitchen in nothing but rumpled trousers and that terrible dressing gown he’d nicked from their guest room on Tyrr. He’d claimed he couldn’t remember what they’d done the night before, and spent a good three minutes just  _standing_  there, goggling at her with a dazed look on his face, rather like he’d just been clocked over the head with a two-by-four.  
  
Sometimes it seems like he’s drifted off for a second or two, only to snap violently back into consciousness a moment later — like that time a few weeks ago when he’d nearly materialized the TARDIS inside a solid cliff face because his mind had wandered off somewhere mid-flight.  
  
Then there was yesterday morning, when he’d jerked away from her mid-snog and just _stared,_  with an expression of stunned disbelief, at the completely ordinary sight of Rose standing in their bathroom — wrapped in a towel, with her hair still wet from the shower. It’s something that he’s seen hundreds of times before, but from the look on his face you’d have thought Rose had suddenly turned into a three-headed purple chicken.  
  
The odd moments do seem to come and go, though. Not fifteen minutes after the incident in the bathroom yesterday, Rose had found him in the kitchen eating marmalade straight from the jar, which is such a common, everyday occurrence that just watching him do it had been immensely comforting. When he saw her staring, he’d smiled and bounded across the room to give her an enthusiastic orange-flavored kiss, and all the awkwardness of the earlier moment was swept under the rug as his fingers traced sticky lines over her previously clean skin.  
  
Part of her thinks she might be able to chalk it up to the Doctor just being the Doctor — mercurial, unpredictable, and prone to keeping things (especially  _important_  things, to Rose’s enduring frustration) to himself. The odd asides are such tiny moments, in the grand scheme of things. Minutes and seconds of incongruity are bookended by weeks of the Doctor being his ordinary daft self; they’re such rare occurrences that she’s not sure if pressing the issue is really necessary.   
  
But there’s also a part of her — a part that gets bigger every time he has an odd moment — that’s really quite worried.  
  
–-  
  
The next few days after the bathroom incident are perfectly ordinary. The Doctor does some TARDIS repairs, they save two planets from total annihilation, and they stop off in London — somewhere in the eighties, going by the hairstyle of the woman working the till at the shop — for a pint of milk and some chocolate biscuits.  
  
But Rose keeps a wary eye on the Doctor the whole time. She’s trying not to be obvious about it, doing her best to observe in as casual a manner as possible, hoping that maybe she can figure out what exactly is going on in that hugely frustrating Time Lord brain.  
  
Evidently, she isn’t as subtle as she thinks she is.  
  
Five days after the bathroom incident, they are sitting in the library, stealing a moment of quiet — well,  _Rose_  is stealing a moment of quiet. The Doctor is sprawled out on the couch next to her with his head in her lap, fidgeting with a piece of machinery.  
  
“Have I done something wrong?” the Doctor asks mildly, as Rose pages through her 63rd-century romance novel.  
  
“What?” She’s so startled that her fingers stutter on the page mid-turn, nearly tearing the flimsy paper. 63rd-century mass-market paperbacks, while enormously entertaining in a pulpy sort of way, are hardly durable. “No, you haven’t. For once. Why?”  
  
The Doctor twists his head a bit, looking up at her from his prone and upside-down position. “Because you’ve been looking at me like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop for days. And I’m wearing both my shoes, so I haven’t got the foggiest idea why you’d think one or both of them had gotten off somewhere.” He frowns. “I think that turn of phrase got away from me.”  
  
Rose can’t help smiling a little at that, and puts down her paperback on the armrest of the couch to card her fingers through his hair. The Doctor makes a deep, humming noise of approval in the back of his throat. “It’s not that you’ve done anything  _wrong,_ ” she begins, unsure exactly how to phrase her concerns without sounding batty.  
  
Then she remembers she’s talking to the Doctor, and decides to just put it plainly. “But lately you’ve been acting a little  _odd._  Forgetting things, or looking at me like you don’t recognize me, or…drifting off for a few moments, here and there.”  
  
She looks down at the Doctor to see him looking quite sincerely confused. “What do you mean,” he asks, pushing himself up and off her lap to sit facing her, “forgetting things?”  
  
“You just—” Rose waves her hands ineffectually, willing them to communicate what she’s having trouble putting into words. “Remember a few weeks ago, when you almost landed us _inside_  that cliff on Myrrek?”  
  
“I got us out of that just fine, thank you very much,” the Doctor says, scowling. “And I blame the TARDIS, not me. The zigzag plotter’s been sticking for  _centuries._ ”  
  
“And then the other day, in the bathroom — for a minute, it was like you barely  _recognized_ me.” Rose is conscious of a bit of a wobble in her voice; she hadn’t quite realized that it had _hurt_  a little, seeing that old expression of uncertainty, of near- _fear,_  on the Doctor’s face.  
  
She’d thought they were long past that.  
  
“Rose Tyler.” Her name on the Doctor’s lips, pronounced in that special way only he can manage, snaps her eyes to his. They’re serious, imparting solemn meaning to his words. “There is no power in this universe that could make me not recognize you.” Then he pauses for a moment, considering. “Well, there might be a few. But I’d put up a hell of a fight!” He shakes a finger in her direction, as if to emphasize the point.  
  
Rose laughs, despite herself. “Stop while you’re ahead, Doctor.”  
  
He covers her smile with a kiss, and for a while, Rose forgets to be worried.  
  
–-  
  
“I’m still not sure what you were talking about,” the Doctor says later, when they’ve made their way out of the library, through the TARDIS’ maze of corridors, and into their bed. “Earlier, in the library.” He looks down at Rose where she’s pillowed on his chest, idly drawing invisible shapes there with her fingertips.  
  
She meets his eyes, and isn’t sure whether to be worried or relieved at the honesty that she finds there. “It’s just—” Rose draws a slow cursive  _R_  on the Doctor’s bare chest, right over his left heart. “You’ve been a little… _strange_  lately.”  
  
He shifts a little, to get a better vantage point as he looks down at her, pressed over and against the line of his body. “What do you mean?”  
  
“Like I said, it’s like you’re…drifting.” Rose sighs, refocusing on the patterns she’s tracing on his pale skin. “Not sure how to explain it, honestly.” She looks up to meet his eyes, suddenly seized by the need for affirmation. “Nothing’s wrong, right? Nothing’s wrong with you that you’re not telling me about? Alien diseases or, I don’t know, time loops or something?”  
  
The Doctor’s response is a soft, reassuring kiss. Then he says, with absolute sincerity, “I promise, Rose. To the best of my knowledge, nothing is wrong.”  
  
Rose still isn’t quite certain he’s right, but she is certain that  _he_  thinks he is, and right now, naked and wrapped around each other in bed, that will do.  
  
Rose settles down into his chest to fall asleep, and as she drifts off he presses his lips to the crown of her head.  
  
His voice is too low, and Rose too sleepy, to really be able to hear — but she can feel his lips form her three favorite words, murmuring them into her hair.  
  
–-  
  
When she wakes, the Doctor is gone.  
  
Rose doesn’t think anything of it, at first. The Doctor doesn’t need as much sleep as she does, though he’s taken to indulging in it as a recreational activity ever since they started sharing a bed. However, the full eight hours she prefers to get is usually far too long a period of inactivity for the Doctor. It’s not unusual for her to wake up and find him gone — or for him to stay with her while she falls asleep, only to go putter around the TARDIS for a few hours before coming back for a quick nap of his own.  
  
But the bed is cold, and Rose is lonely, and she’s confident in her ability to coerce the Doctor back into it if she can just find wherever he’s scarpered off to. So she pulls on a dressing gown and locates her slippers and pads out into the corridor in search of a Time Lord.  
  
She doesn’t have to look far. He’s in the console room, which is always the first place Rose checks. His back is to her, and he’s fiddling with the monitor, muttering to himself under his breath.  
  
Rose creeps out of the corridor and onto the grating quietly, her soundless walk the fruit of many years of practice. As quiet as she is, though, the Doctor usually still hears her — whatever he’s working on is clearly absorbing a great deal of his attention. Even as she comes right up behind him, he still doesn’t move to acknowledge her, doesn’t say  _hello, Rose_  or  _I can hear you, you know, superior Time Lord senses._  
  
But when she slides her arms around his waist from behind, insinuating a hand between his oxford and the skin of his abdomen, he  _jumps._  
  
Then he whirls around lightning-fast, dislodging her hands in the process. “Rose!” His voice is high-pitched and squeaky, wavering between surprise and fear. “I, um, didn’t see you there!”  
  
Rose tries very, very hard not to jump to conclusions. But she can see it, now that she thinks to look for it. It’s the same look he had in the bathroom a few days earlier, the same look he had on when he couldn’t remember Melaros. She takes a step back, putting a bit of distance between them, and wraps her arms around herself. “You said nothing was wrong,” she snaps, concern fraying into irritation. “But you lied, didn’t you? Something  _is_  wrong, and you’ve not been telling me.”  
  
The Doctor’s face shifts — from an expression of barely restrained panic to one of grim resignation. “Yes and no.” He flinches a bit when she laughs, harshly and without humor. “Rose,” he continues, gravely. “I’m sorry, but something is very,  _very_  wrong.”  
  



	3. Chapter 3

It’s happened eighteen times now.  
  
Eighteen times the Doctor has felt the world _shift_ around him. Eighteen times he’s been rooted to the ground, momentarily unable to move while the dizzying sensation of the shift passes. When he can manage to keep his eyes open, the visual experience is absolutely bizarre – rooms spin and colors blur, edges melting into each other like the world is a bleeding watercolor painting.  
  
The first shift took him from the TARDIS kitchen to the console, and he’d been so utterly confused by the whole experience that he’d barely had time to keep the ship from materializing inside a wall of solid rock before everything had gone _wobbly_ again.  
  
The next shift after that had taken him to the library, and had come with another costume change. The suit jacket he’d been wearing just moments before at the console had vanished, leaving the Doctor in nothing but his trousers and an oxford, with his tie hanging loose around his neck. He’d been seated on a couch, feet propped up on a coffee table and mouth frozen open, halfway through a sentence he couldn’t remember starting.  
  
No matter where he ends up, though, there is always one constant – Rose.  
  
Rose, sitting on the kitchen counter in her knickers and his oxford, hair mussed from sleep and…other things. Rose, shrieking as she’s thrown around the console room while he tries to avoid condemning them to an unpleasant rocky death. Rose, poking her head out of the library stacks and asking _what did you say, Doctor?_  
  
When the world settles after the seventeenth shift, the Doctor doesn’t even have time to open his eyes before he feels Rose’s lips pressed against his. There’s no time for consideration, for thought, before he lets out a low involuntary moan into her mouth.  
  
He leans into the kiss for a moment before realizing exactly what’s happening, at which point he practically _leaps_ away from her at the shock of it. Taking in the sight of her induces a rather different sort of shock, because Rose is wearing almost nothing – just a towel wrapped snugly around her body, clinging in all the right places. He’s clearly startled her with his abrupt movement, because she’s staring at him with confusion written all over her face.  
  
“Doctor?” Rose asks, with a note of worry in her voice. “Are you all right?”  
  
He should tell her. He really should. He should have said something that very first time, in the kitchen, should’ve told her as soon as he realized something was wrong.  
  
But they’re such _tiny_ bits of time, these jumps – anywhere from thirty minutes to thirty seconds – and the image they create when they’re all put together is so impossibly, unbelievably tempting. The bathroom, where Rose’s hairbrush sits next to his hair gel on the counter. Her trainers tucked under the side of the bed they apparently share, next to his own dirty Chucks. The way Rose talks to him and touches him, the affection of a lover folded into the familiarity of their friendship. They all come together in a big picture that’s all quite domestic and sentimental and ridiculous, and the Doctor _wants_ it so much it almost hurts.  
  
But he’s a coward, every time. So the Doctor schools his face into something resembling confidence, gives Rose a quick smile, and dashes out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, and into the corridor – where, of course, the world promptly shifts again.  
  
When he shakes off the dizziness and takes stock of the world on the eighteenth go-round, it appears that there is no Rose in the immediate vicinity. There’s a part of the Doctor that wants to immediately go and find her, but the more rational part of him seizes upon the chance for a bit of uninterrupted study, and reluctantly settles for a quick check to verify that Rose is, in fact, on the TARDIS.  
  
He’s still utterly baffled by what’s going on. It _should_ be temporal displacement, what with all the _shifting,_ the lack of context he’s got for current events, and the fairly localized occurrences. Not a single shift has taken him off the TARDIS, which he’s rather grateful for. But he’s experienced temporal displacement and similar phenomena dozens of times, and this isn’t anything like that. For one thing, plain old temporal displacement doesn’t send his time sense completely round the bend. Whatever _this_ is, it’s mentally as well as physically dizzying. He can’t tell up from down, temporally speaking. All he can do is measure the passage of time in each instance, take note of the seconds and minutes and tally them up; as far as he can tell, it’s only been a matter of hours, Earth time, since this all started. Everything else – timelines, probabilities, divergences and convergences – is… _fuzzy_.  
  
It’s beyond disconcerting, as is the fact that his connection with the TARDIS is still _off._ The Doctor had chalked it up to the shifting, the first few times, but he’s less sure that’s really the problem now. This sort of strain on their mental link is more akin to the oppressive sense of separation he’d felt on Krop Tor, when he thought he’d lost the old girl forever.  
  
Krop Tor. That’s the last thing he can remember with any sort of clarity, before waking up naked and confused in an unfamiliar bed, at the beginning of this cycle of madness. Well, the _aftermath_ of Krop Tor, more specifically. Getting the TARDIS back, getting _Rose_ back, saying goodbye to Ida and the others. Stealing one last, lingering hug from Rose before she wandered off back to her bedroom for a much-needed rest.  
  
Everything just sort of cuts out there, at the sight of Rose disappearing into the corridor, at the memory of wishing he could follow her back to her room, just slip into bed with her and–  
  
But he hadn’t. He _does_ remember that.  
  
Anyhow, none of that seems connected to _this._ Of course, there are dozens of possibilities as to what all this could be, but there’s just no _time_ to check them all, not when he’s constantly hopping from moment to moment like this. All he’s had time to ascertain for certain, in stolen minutes here and there, is that Rose is in fact _Rose._ She’s not been replaced by an android or a shape-shifter, hasn’t been body-snatched or the like. She’s just not _his_ Rose, not the girl he’d watched walk away just a few hours ago in linear time.  
  
He’s just turned his attention to the monitor on the console, beginning to program some scans for temporal anomalies and environmental factors that could be precipitating his _problem_ – when suddenly there are _fingers_ slipping under his shirt, arms wrapping around him from behind, and it’s so unexpected that the Doctor can’t help but jump.  
  
—-  
  
“I’m sorry, but something is very, _very_ wrong.”  
  
The Doctor regrets saying it almost immediately. As soon as the words are out, Rose’s expression shifts in a decidedly unpleasant way. Concern and irritation morph into uneasiness, even distrust; it’s the same way she’d looked at him just after he regenerated, and it shakes him to the core in a way it probably shouldn’t.  
  
The glue that’s holding him together really shouldn’t be Rose Tyler’s trust, but–  
  
“So you did lie to me, then.” It’s a statement, not a question, and Rose’s voice is unnervingly flat. “I _just_ asked you about this, not eight hours ago, and you said nothing was wrong.”  
  
The Doctor puts up his hands in what he hopes is a placating gesture. “Ah, but that’s the thing, you see, because _I_ didn’t say that.”  
  
Rose’s eyes narrow in suspicion. “You absolutely did,” she says, through clenched teeth.  
  
“No, I didn’t.” The Doctor takes a small step towards her, but she matches it with a large step away from him, so far back that her legs bump against the jump seat. “Because the last thing I remember, before this, of course, is, um–” He has to clear his throat to stall for a moment, because it’s still so fresh, that memory of Rose just out of the shower, hair wet and skin damp and lips pressed against his. He rushes out the next few words as rapidly as possible, hoping that maybe he can push the image from his brain if he describes it very, very quickly. “–kissingyouinthebathroom.”  
  
Rose pales, and she sinks down onto the jump seat with one hand over her mouth. She shakes her head a few times, her expression incredulous, before saying, “Doctor, that was _days_ ago.”  
  
He’d suspected some substantial amount of time had passed. Even though his time sense has gone inexplicably wonky, the differences in his and Rose’s attire alone would indicate that, and what context he’s managed to pick up during the jumps always seems to do the same. It’s still a little bit shocking to hear it confirmed, though. The Doctor stumbles back, involuntarily, and lets himself sag against the rather comforting bulk of the console. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles, if only because there’s not much else to say.  
  
“What’s going on?” Rose asks, in a small voice. “Is it just…a memory thing? Some kind of sickness? Like that time we went to – oh, what was the name of that planet, the one where the pollen caused short-term memory loss?”  
  
“Aldea,” he supplies, in answer to her question. “But no, it’s not like that. At least, I don’t _think_ it’s like that.”  
  
Rose’s face falls. “What _is_ it like, then?”  
  
The Doctor rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “It’s _like_ temporal displacement – well, it’s what it _looks_ like. But that’s not what it is. I’ve experienced that before, and this isn’t it. But losing _days_ – that’s not just short-term memory loss, Rose.”  
  
Rose bites her lip, worrying it between her teeth, and the Doctor has to remind himself to _focus_ , because this is _serious._ “Temporal displacement – like, time jumps? So you’re…what? From our – _your_ – past?” She looks a bit dubious.  
  
He shrugs, trying to look as nonchalant as possible – and, he suspects, failing. “It’s possible. But again, unlikely, unless I’ve completely forgotten what that feels like.” Rose flinches, and he winces at the poor choice of words.  
  
“So what _do_ you remember?” she asks quietly.  
  
The Doctor pushes himself off of the console and moves over towards the jump seat – asking silently, with a nod and a gesture at the empty space next to Rose, if he can join her. She nods, and after settling down next to her, he recounts his experiences as best as he can – leaving out, of course, the running internal monologue of awestruck _howwhywhen **Rose**_ that’s been on loop in his head since all this began. By the time he’s finished, Rose is sitting curled in a ball on the jump seat, arms hugging her knees to her chest.  
  
“Before that time in the kitchen,” he says, in a voice that he hopes sounds calm but suspects doesn’t, “the last thing I remember is Krop Tor. Or, more accurately, being on the TARDIS after we’d sorted Krop Tor. And then I woke up here, in the bedroom, and–”  
  
“Years.” Rose’s voice sounds choked as she cuts him off, hoarse and overwrought.  
  
“What?”  
  
“That was _years_ ago, Doctor.” She turns to look at him, and he can tell she’s trying very hard not to cry. “It’s been _three years_ since Krop Tor.”  
  
It feels like his hearts stop beating for a moment. They don’t, of course, because Time Lord cardiovascular systems are nothing if not efficient. His body really isn’t susceptible to that sort of lapse, no matter how strong of an emotional response he’s experiencing – but still, there’s a wash of prickling shock that sweeps over him, a breath-stealing sensation that’s not so much about worry as it is about _hope._  
  
The Doctor still isn’t sure he trusts any of this, because he’s clearly impaired and there’s something wrong with the TARDIS and he still hasn’t got a damn clue what the hell is going on, which is not a comforting combination of circumstances in any situation.  
  
But _three years._ Three years in which he’d apparently mustered up the courage to say _damn it all_ , to jump off the cliff he’s been teetering on the edge of for months upon months. Three years and a shared bedroom and Rose in his shirt on the kitchen counter and Rose next to him in bed and Rose still by his side, not lost or moved on or dead in battle.  
  
If the Doctor believed in gods, this is what he’d ask them for.  
  
“I could maybe–” He pauses for a moment, because _this_ , it’s–  
  
There’s a reason he’s never really talked about this with Rose. He’s never explained it in any detail to her, never intimated what it can really mean, in particular contexts.  
  
The context of a relationship like theirs, for example – so much more than friends, and not much less than lovers.  
  
He’s never even allowed himself to fantasize about it, though he’s long since given in to fantasizing about being one with her in other ways. Many, many other ways. The wide variety of positions and locations and surfaces that his (old, filthy, lecherous) brain has managed to conjure up over the years he’s known Rose is really quite staggering.  
  
But this won’t be, _can’t_ be like that. The Doctor makes himself focus on the here and now, on the relevant, the practical, and not on what telepathic beings crave from the people they lo–  
  
From people they’re close to. What telepathic beings can’t help but need. What he hasn’t felt since long before the War ended.  
  
The Doctor forces himself to take a breath, shaky and pointless though it is, and continues. “I could go into your mind – your memories. See what it is I’m missing. Maybe get enough context to figure out what’s going on. I could catch something you didn’t at the time, or see it from a different angle.” He tries to put a bit of cheerfulness in his voice, going for reassurance. “Sometimes that’s all you need for a problem – bit of fresh perspective.”  
  
Rose bites her lip, pausing for a moment, before nodding. “All right.”  
  
They shift a little on the jump seat, turning to face each other, before the Doctor spreads his hands across the sides of Rose’s face. His middle and index fingers press lightly against her temples, while his thumbs come to rest on her cheeks, just grazing the line of her cheekbones. He finds himself resisting a very strong urge to turn this moment into something else entirely – to stroke the soft skin of her face with his thumbs, to press himself against her, to coax her mouth open with lips and tongue while her mind opens to his.  
  
The idea is beyond intoxicating, and he absolutely shouldn’t do it. _Can’t_ do it. Not now. Probably not ever.  
  
So instead the Doctor steels himself, prepares for the rush of sound and sensation and memory that comes with entering another being’s mind, and tries not to think of it in _Rose_ terms. He closes his eyes, putting distracting images out of sight. Like Rose’s lips, pink and soft and slightly parted. Or Rose’s eyes, looking darker than usual in the dim light of the console room. He narrows his focus to the intangible, the mental – strips away physical awareness, sight and sound and smell and taste, until there’s nothing left to do but open his mind to Rose’s.  
  
And then nothing happens.


	4. Chapter 4

Rose feels like she ought to close her eyes.  
  
The Doctor’s hands are splayed across either side of her face, middle and index fingers pressed to her temples and thumbs resting on her cheeks. His eyes are closed, his mouth is slightly open, and his eyebrows are drawn down and together. It’s the way he always looks when he’s focusing on something, and she still finds it a bit mesmerizing, the sight of his face this close up – no matter how many times she’s seen it before.  
  
Rose isn’t sure what to expect from this. It’s not something they’ve ever done before. She knows the Doctor is telepathic, but it’s one of those things he doesn’t talk about much, one of the topics he dances around until it becomes absolutely necessary to discuss it. He’s only used it in front of her once, with that little girl and the Isolus all those years ago. On the rare occasion he’s talked about it, the Doctor has volunteered precious little information; he’s told her that it’s _‘more like walking through a museum than reading a book’_ and that it’s something all his people could do.  
  
As with most conversations that involve his people, the Doctor tends to stop talking long before Rose gets much useful information.  
  
She studies his face, one more time. If possible, it’s screwed up even more, twisted into an expression that looks more puzzled than focused. “Doctor?” she asks hesitantly, still not closing her eyes.  
  
He makes a soft _hmmm_ noise in response, but doesn’t open his eyes and doesn’t stop looking perplexed. Rose takes it as acknowledgment and pushes on. “Is there anything I need to do? I mean, if it is – if this _is_ your future, you can’t go knowing everything about it, can you?”  
  
The Doctor nods distractedly. The confused expression on his face seems to be edging closer to frustration, but he gives her an answer anyways. “Anything you don’t want me to see, just imagine it’s behind a door. If it’s really temporal displacement, though, there are other ways I can – I can make myself forget, or–” His sentence trails off at the end, and Rose can see his eyes darting back and forth beneath their lids. His lips move slightly as his fingers press a little harder against her temples, forming half-words and confused _ohs_.  
  
She’s just starting to flip through memories, wondering how on earth to decide what to share and what to hide, if anything, when the Doctor’s eyes pop open. They’re wide and shocked – maybe even a little _scared_ – as he croaks “ _What?_ ”  
  
His voice is incredulous, and he’s looking at Rose like he can’t quite believe she’s real. “What?” she parrots back at him, confused and concerned. “Doctor, what is it?”  
  
He shakes his head once, then closes his eyes again and leans in even further, his face so close to hers that their foreheads are nearly touching. He schools his face into an expression of supreme concentration, and Rose finds herself stifling a small bit of laughter, despite the seriousness of the moment. He really does look a bit silly, with every muscle in his face and neck strained and his eyebrows pushed so close together.  
  
However, any amusement she might have gotten out of the situation dies as soon as the Doctor pulls his hands from her temples and stumbles back.  
  
He looks _lost_. His eyes dart from his hands – which he’s holding out in front of him, examining them like they’re a completely new body part – up to Rose, then back to his hands, and then back to Rose again. “Doctor?” she asks again, as the uncomfortably familiar sensation of dread settles in the pit of her stomach. “What’s wrong?”  
  
“I can’t–” he starts, looking down at his hands. “It’s not _working._ There’s no reason it shouldn’t be _working._ ”  
  
“You mean you can’t see inside my head?”  
  
The Doctor nods mutely, but doesn’t say anything further. Rose takes a tentative step towards him, reaching for his outstretched hands with her own. Their fingers twine together immediately, a reflex developed long before they’d ever been anything more than friends.  
  
At least _some_ things, Rose is pleased to note, haven’t changed.  
  
“Hey.” She tightens her grip on his hand, squeezing gently until the Doctor’s eyes come up to meet hers. “There’s an explanation for this, yeah? There’s got to be.” Rose puts as much confidence in her voice as she can muster. “Any ideas, right off the top?”  
  
The Doctor, still looking a bit shell-shocked, shakes his head. Rose lets out a frustrated breath. “Right, then. Come on.” She lets go of one of his hands and tugs on the other, pulling him towards the corridor that leads into the bowels of the TARDIS.  
  
“Where – Rose, what are you doing?” the Doctor sputters, as she drags him out of the console room and into the dimly lit hallway.  
  
“I’m making us some tea,” she mumbles. “Unless you’ve got a better idea.”  
  
The Doctor just trails along behind her, silently.  
  
—-  
  
Even the routine motions of making tea don’t provide any of the comfort they usually do. Rose performs the familiar tasks like a sleepwalker – barely able to remember how she got from putting the kettle on to adding milk and sugar in she and the Doctor’s respective mugs.  
  
The Doctor seems to be in a similar sort of haze, at least as far as Rose can tell. He’s taken up a seat at the kitchen table, sitting there with his elbows on the wood surface and his head in his hands. By the time the tea’s finished and Rose is making her way over to join him, he’s pulled his head back to look at his hands with a dazed expression, as if he’s puzzled that they’re attached to his body.  
  
She places the Doctor’s steaming cup of tea in front of him, and he doesn’t so much as hum in acknowledgement – just keeps staring at his hands with narrowed eyes, shaking his head back and forth.  
  
Rose poured his tea into his favorite mug, out of habit. It’s a tiny little blue-and-white thing, almost too small for a proper cuppa, and she’d bought it for him on a lark ages ago. They’d been in America, at a swap meet of all places, somewhere in the mid-22nd century. She still doesn’t really know _where_ , as the Doctor hadn’t told her, but she can remember the light blue of the cloudless sky, and the heat of the midsummer sun, and that the air had smelled of rust and dust and fried food.  
  
The mug says _Trust Me, I’m a Doctor_ on the side, stenciled out by hand in bright blue block letters that look striking against the white ceramic. Rose bought the thing for a laugh and the Doctor had immediately declared it a rubbish purchase, as he’d never be caught dead drinking his tea out of a mug bearing that sort of terrible pun on his name. That he’d gone on to drink his tea out of that mug almost exclusively was, of course, just a fluke.  
  
That was two years ago.  
  
Rose wonders, with a sharp and bitter pang of sadness, if the Doctor will ever remember it.  
  
“So,” she says awkwardly, after a few moments of silence make it clear that the Doctor is far too wrapped up in his own thoughts to start any kind of conversation. “You can’t see inside my head. And you don’t remember… _anything_?”  
  
The Doctor snaps to at the sound of her voice, shaking his head and letting his hands fall towards the table, wrapping around his mug of tea. “Weeell, you’d have to define _anything_ , I suppose.” He sniffs thoughtfully, taking a sip of tea before continuing. “Like I said, I remember all of the jumps. I remember Krop Tor, and everything before that. All the way back to _run._ ” He flashes a grin in Rose’s direction, clearly trying to get her to smile back. She can only manage a half-smile, just a quick quirk of the lips, and the Doctor’s face falls.  
  
“After that–” he says quietly, “–well, after that, I’m afraid I’m a bit lost.”  
  
“Well, we’ve got to start somewhere, so…process of elimination,” Rose offers. “Can we rule out what this _isn’t_?”  
  
The Doctor gives her a smile that she has, over the years, come to recognize as his _aren’t-you-just-brilliant-Rose-Tyler_ smile, used as shorthand when they’re in too much of a hurry or too big of a jam for him to actually _say_ it. It pulls a real, if still rather small, smile of her own to her lips.  
  
The Doctor nods emphatically. “Yes. Yes, I think we can eliminate quite a few things. Have to leave temporal displacement on the table, even though I’m not sure it fits, but there’s other things. For example, you’re _you_ , not been replaced by an android or the Autons or any such thing, which means–”  
  
“Wait,” Rose interrupts. “Were you actually concerned that I wasn’t _me?_ ”  
  
She expects a quick _no, of course not_ that she can quickly follow up with teasing, but the Doctor doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he suddenly becomes quite fascinated with his mug, tracing out the blue painted letters with one long finger as he studiously avoids her gaze.  
  
“Is this – are _we_ so unbelievable that you honestly thought I might be made of _plastic?_ ”  
  
The Doctor is silent for a long moment before he continues as if she hadn’t said anything at all. Rose feels a surge of unusually fierce _anger_ at his typical avoidance tactics, and just barely resists the urge to snap at him. It’s not likely that it’d help. “It could be psychic pollen,” he muses, still tracing the lines of the word _trust_ on his mug. “Or I could be dreaming,” he says, in a voice so small and quiet that Rose almost doesn’t hear it. He stops running his fingers over the surface of the cup and buries his head in his hands again, muttering something she can’t make out into the skin of his palms.  
  
“Unless we’re both having the same dream, I highly doubt that,” Rose says, through gritted teeth. “In case you’d forgotten, _I’m_ here too. Here and _real_ , just like you said.”  
  
At that, the Doctor’s head pops up from the cradle of his hands, quick and sudden as a jack-in-the box. “Wait.” He points a finger in Rose’s direction. “Say that again.”  
  
Rose can’t help squinting at him in confusion. “Say what again?”  
  
The Doctor ignores her again, waving his hand dismissively before continuing. “Oh, _Rose_ , we’re going about this backwards.” There’s something that resembles understanding dawning on the Doctor’s face, and it makes her feel immeasurably better.  
  
That is, until he finishes speaking. “Rose, what do _you_ remember?”  
  
“About what?” she splutters. “You’ll have to be a bit more specific than that.”  
  
“No, I won’t,” the Doctor says confidently. “Anything. Tell me anything about the last three years. Pick an event. Tell me about – the night after Krop Tor. Last thing I remember, I sent you off to bed. What happened then, as you remember it?”  
  
Rose is quite sure that her cheeks have gone scarlet. “Well, after Krop Tor, you–” She runs her finger around the rim of her mug, trying desperately to avoid the Doctor’s gaze. “You came to my room, and you – we –”  
  
She remembers every single detail of that night – their _first_ night – with vivid clarity. The sound of the Doctor knocking on her door, not an hour after she’d left him in the console room. The way he’d felt against her when he’d pressed her up against the wall of her room, the noises he’d made into her mouth as they kissed. The feel of him bare against her when they finally made their way to the bed, and the words – some sweet and some filthy and some in a language she couldn’t understand – that he’d breathed into her skin.  
  
She’s just not certain she can say any of it out loud. Not to _this_ Doctor, who doesn’t remember any of it. Who doesn’t, if she’s not mistaken, even consider… _that_ …to be a possibility for them.  
  
The Doctor seems to realize what she’s getting at, and a rather fetching shade of pink colors his cheeks as well. “Er, well, it doesn’t have to be that. The, um, specific event isn’t important. But I’m assuming you remember it in…detail?” He cringes a bit at the last.  
  
Rose nods, still avoiding his eyes. Then the Doctor picks up his mug of tea – though not to take a drink. “This mug wasn’t here before, was it? It’s something picked up in the last three years.” He examines the bit of ceramic with interest. “I bet you could tell me exactly when you got this, and where, and what color shirt you were wearing when you bought it, and what the merchant who sold it to you looked like. In fact, I’d wager that you could give me that level of detail about _anything_ that’s happened in the last, say…three years.”  
  
Rose realizes, with a start, that she _can._ “Are you saying that’s _bad?_ ” she asks hesitantly. “It’s _bad_ that I can remember so much of–” She stops just short of saying _our life together_ , mind swimming and heart sinking as she realizes that she already knows the answer – and as she struggles to understand how she’d never _noticed_ any of this before.  
  
She feels, all of a sudden, like a stranger in her own mind.  
  
“I’m saying it tells me what I need to know.” The Doctor says calmly, before his face breaks out in a real, proper grin, the most genuine one she’s seen from him this whole night. “I’m not _dreaming_ , Rose. I’m _awake!_ ”  
  
Before Rose can ask what the hell the Doctor is on about, he’s closed his eyes and screwed up his face in concentration – a mirror of his expression in the console room, earlier – and the kitchen begins to _shift._  
  
It looks like everything’s bleeding away around her, and it feels like she’s the only thing bolted to the ground in an earthquake-rattled building. Rose closes her eyes and gropes for something, _anything_ to hold onto, but she’s left grasping at air while the world falls apart.  
  
—-  
  
When Rose opens her eyes, it’s to a world so bright that she has to shut them again almost immediately. Everything flashes white for a brief moment, and even when her eyes are closed spots dance across the insides of her eyelids. There’s a ringing sensation in her ears and a throbbing ache radiating from her temples. Her back is _killing_ her, her mouth is dry, and her lips are cracked. It’s the worst hangover she’s ever had, multiplied by ten, and Rose can’t help letting out a keening, miserable sound as she pitches up and forward – apparently she’s been laying down, though _where_ she’s got absolutely no idea – and then buries her face in her hands. When she tries to speak the breath catches in her parched throat. She nearly chokes at the surprise of it, has a moment of panic when she can’t quite push air into her lungs. Thankfully it passes quickly, but when she does draw in a breath the air is so cold it stings.  
  
“Easy there,” says a voice, somewhere to her right. It takes a moment for Rose to swim through the haze of misery and realize that it is, in fact, the Doctor’s voice. “Relax,” he continues. “Deep breaths. Don’t try to move too quickly. You’ve been out of it for quite a while – it’ll take a bit to bounce back.”  
  
She feels what must be the Doctor’s hand come to rest on her upper back. It stays there for a moment, hand still and firm and comforting, before he starts to move in slow, soothing circles. He’s silent while she collects herself, doesn’t do anything except trace a constant, soothing pattern on her back.  
  
After a few minutes in which the spots across her vision fade and the pounding in her head subsides, Rose slowly cracks open one eye in an attempt to brave the world again.  
  
It hurts less this time. She opens her eyes gradually, one after the other, but the world is still blindingly bright, if monochromatic. She’s in a very small room. It’s white all over – floor, ceiling, walls, everything – and there’s light pouring down from recessed panels set into the ceiling. There are no windows and no doors, at least as far as Rose can tell, and the only furnishings are two beds, one of which she’s sitting up on.  
  
Well, she says _beds_. They’re more like tables, really, platforms made out of hard synthetic material, with no linens to speak of. They look stark and utilitarian, more like morgue slabs than anywhere one might want to sleep.  
  
The one spot of color in the room is the Doctor. Rose can see now that he’s standing next to her ‘bed’, one hand still on her back and the other on the hard surface she’s sitting on. He’s not a _big_ spot of color, mind. His pinstriped suit is missing, replaced by an outfit that distinctly resembles medical scrubs – all white, just like the rest of the room. He looks even paler than usual, his already light complexion utterly washed out by the expanse of white fabric.  
  
When she finally meets his eyes, a relieved smile spreads across the Doctor’s face. “Welcome back,” he says warmly, punctuating the phrase with one last gentle caress up and down her back before he pulls his hand away.  
  
“Back?” she croaks. She clears her throat again before speaking, but her voice still comes out hoarse and rough. “Back from _where?_ ”


	5. Chapter 5

The Doctor has, on occasion, tried to explain what recovering a repressed memory feels like.  
  
Jo had asked him about it once, back in the old days, after that mess with Omega and his past selves. He wasn’t sure then (and still isn’t sure now, to be quite honest) that it’s something that will ever really make sense to anyone bound by the relatively limited capacity of the human brain. But Jo had wanted to know how it all worked – how he kept the out-of-order moments and inopportune meetings in his life from causing inconveniences (at best) and paradoxes (at worst).  
  
In looking for a metaphor she would understand, he’d settled on saying that it was a bit like dropping a needle onto a record.  
  
Everything up until the moment the memory comes back is the muted scratch of a needle on vinyl, searching for a groove and not quite finding it. Then the trigger hits. He reaches the proper point in the causality loop, or comes to the right place at the right time, or sees the right person do the right thing. It’s not usually jarring, or even particularly surprising. After all, one expects that the dull scraping of a needle on vinyl will eventually shift into the opening bars of _A Hard Day’s Night_ , provided that the record and player are both in working order.   
  
But _this,_ what he’s feeling now?  
  
It’s nothing like that.   
If remembering something that he’s repressed is a natural, if not exactly _predictable_ , process – a needle finding the groove of a record, cogs slotting into their proper places, puzzle pieces fitting together– then the barrage of memory that slams into the Doctor’s mind as he wakes is a lorry blowing through a traffic stop, or a bull charging through a china shop. It’s unexpected, unplanned, and altogether a bit too much to handle.  
  
He opens his eyes, on reflex, and finds that he has to shut them again almost instantly. Wherever he is, it’s bright and white, and the intensity of the glare sends a sharp throb of pain through his head. Unfortunately, the view behind his eyelids is just as overwhelming, a rush of sight and smell and sound and taste so intense that he can barely separate one event from another. This isn’t one out-of-order memory clicking into place – it’s a veritable _avalanche_ of them, slamming into his mind all at once and making him dizzy.  
  
Rose’s words from earlier drift through his mind, attached to the memory of them sitting at the kitchen table in the TARDIS, trying to puzzle out what was happening. _Unless we’re both having the same dream…._  
  
She’d been right. And at the same time, completely wrong.  
  
Wait. _Rose._  
  
The Doctor forces his eyes open with a start, and levers himself up and off the hard surface he’s lying on – _blimey,_ a bit too fast, that _hurt_. His hearts are racing and it still feels a bit like someone’s using the inside of his head as a steel drum, but all of that is insignificant compared to the fact that at this moment, he doesn’t know where Rose is.  
  
It only takes another moment for him to search the small, bright space and realize that she’s on the other side of the room. Seeing her, however, does little to assuage the prickling sensation of panic that’s making his pulse skyrocket and the hairs on his arms stand straight up.  
  
Rose is across the room from him, lying motionless on a plain slab table much like the one he’s on. She’s dressed in what looks like white hospital scrubs, and looks pale and washed-out, like a wax figure – or like a corpse.  
  
The Doctor is up and off the table so fast it sends another fierce spike of pain through his head, but he couldn’t care less. When he reaches the other table and reaches out to touch Rose, her skin feels like ice. It isn’t until he manages to fumble for her wrist and find a pulse – thready and weak, but still there, thank the stars, still _there_ – that he can manage speech. “Rose,” he says, gently shaking her by the shoulder. “Rose, wake up. Please.”  
  
She stirs, just a bit, and he shakes her a little more forcefully, with no success. He’s just about to try speaking to her again when she makes a pained, moaning sound and sits up too quickly, springing up and off the bed almost violently.  
  
“Easy there,” he says, deliberately pitching his voice in a low, calming register as he brings a hand to Rose’s back, steadying her physically while he attends to the platitudes – _relax_ and _take deep breaths_ and _don’t try to move too quickly._ Rose is gasping and shaking, as if every breath she draws in requires a great deal of effort, and her eyes are screwed shut. When she finally stops trembling and opens her eyes, he’s so happy to see them again that he can’t help but grin at her as he says, “Welcome back.”  
  
“Back?” Her voice is hoarse, and it sets off a chain reaction in his brain – calls up dozens and dozens of memories of Rose speaking in that particular register, her voice hoarse from sleep or sickness or screaming or…other things. “Back from _where?_ ”  
  
He runs his hands through his hair, somewhat at a loss as to what to do with them now that he’s no longer touching Rose.“Er–”  
  
He’s not sure how to explain it, really.  
  
It hasn’t been three years. He’d known that as soon as he woke up – knew it, actually, as soon as Rose put the idea he needed into his head, time sense or no time sense.  
  
It was just a matter of knowing what to look for. _Memory_ implies the recollection of something that actually _happened_ , and the one thing he’s absolutely certain of, at this moment, is that not one of the avalanche of things that have just poured into his head really happened.  
  
Well, not _physically_. Just because it’s happening inside your head doesn’t mean it isn’t–  
  
Hang about, that’s J.K. Nevermind.  
  
Regardless, he’s absolutely sure that the… _memories,_ for lack of a better word, aren’t that at all. There are a lot of things you can do to convince a brain – even a Time Lord brain – to believe in something that hasn’t actually taken place. There are plenty of ways to fool it, dozens of drugs and chemical and toxins that even _he_ would have trouble detecting or metabolizing. There are plenty of methods he wouldn’t have cottoned onto right away, that wouldn’t have been anywhere near as obvious as the sloppy telepathic fingerprints that are currently smeared all over the walls of his mind.  
  
Rose cuts him off before he can make an attempt at explaining that he doesn’t really have an explanation. “I remember – we were in the kitchen. On the TARDIS.” Rose puts a hand to her temple and rubs at it, screwing up her face in concentration. “You were saying…something about being awake? Or asleep, maybe? It’s all a bit…fuzzy.”  
  
She shakes her head a bit, as if to clear it. “But…it’s still really vivid at the same time, yeah? Like one of those really intense dreams? The kind that stay with you for a bit, after you wake up?”  
  
There’s a beat of uncomfortable silence before Rose looks up at him again, something like panic in her eyes. “It _was_ just a weird dream or something, though, right? I mean, we weren’t really – we didn’t really –none of that actually–”  
  
The Doctor does his best to school his face into a neutral expression and to temper his voice with calm detachment before he asks, “What else do you remember, Rose?”  
  
The flush on her cheeks calls up another slew of memories, of times she blushed that way – of time _he_ made her blush that way, with lips and teeth and tongue and words whispered in her ear, and he should _really_ tell her that he remembers it all, manufactured or not, every single blessed moment of those years that weren’t–  
  
“Bits and pieces. Remember being in the TARDIS. Or somewhere that looked like the TARDIS. Feels like I’ve been asleep for _ages._ ” She looks up at him, eyes wide and liquid and trusting, and it sends a stab of something much sharper and hotter than pain straight through his hearts. “It was just a dream, though. Right, Doctor?”  
  
It shouldn’t change anything, whether she remembers or not. He should tell her what happened – well, his suspicions about what happened, at least.  
  
But–  
  
 _Coward, every time._  
  
“Must have been, Rose.” He forces a smile, and allows himself to touch her one more time – just a quick brush of his left hand, up her back and over her shoulder. “Must have been.”  
  
—-  
  
It’s not long before Rose begins to complain of a returning headache. The Doctor can sympathize – the insistent throb of pain in his own head still hasn’t subsided either, and he’s quite certain that his pain tolerance is a lot higher than Rose’s.  
  
“Think you could turn down the lights, mate?” Rose addresses her tart remark to the unresponsive ceiling before burying her head in her hands, squeezing her eyes shut in pain.  
  
He gently rubs her back a few more times, at a bit of a loss as to what to do for her. “It’s like a hangover, but _so_ much worse,” she mumbles miserably, before taking a hand away from her face to wave it in his general direction. “Go on. ‘M not made of glass. Head’s killin’ me, but I’ll live. Figure out how we’re gonna get out of this place.”  
  
Obediently, he lets go of her and proceeds to survey their surroundings, making an effort to take in everything that the concentrated onslaught of memory and his rush to make sure Rose was all right hadn’t given him time to catalogue. Unfortunately, there really isn’t much to see beyond that his first vague impression of the place – which was that it was white, bright, and very spartan. It’s a fairly small room, with no furniture beyond the two beds he and Rose had been unconscious on, and no visible windows or doors. The electric lights in the ceiling indicate there’s power, though, and from the particular chemical tang of the processed air in the room he’d put money on them being underground. None of these clues inspire a great deal of confidence on their own; put together, they are even less encouraging.  
  
However, perhaps the most worrying thing about all of this is the fact that there’s still a considerable gap in his memory.  
  
While the influx of manufactured memory now rattling around in his brain has certainly been… _illuminating_ , there’s still a bit of time he can’t account for. Namely, whatever happened between their departure from Krop Tor and ending up _here_ , sans suit and TARDIS and sonic screwdriver, dressed like he’s in hospital.  
  
Logically, he knows they must have landed somewhere, must have gotten in some sort of scrape that ended up with them captured and imprisoned for one reason or another. That’s practically business as usual. But he’d still really like to know _how_ and _why_ , especially considering the troubling results of that particular escapade.  
  
While Rose stays put on her table, now gently rubbing at her temples with her fingers, the Doctor takes his investigation of the room to the walls.  
  
Licking’s always a good place to start, after all.  
  
“Bleh,” he spits out, after giving the nearest wall an experimental taste. “Never did fancy the taste of metamolecular alloys. Particularly when they’re coated with paint.”  
  
For the sake of discovery, however, he buries his dislike and chances one more lick. “ _However,_ the deplorably bland walls do tell me we’re _definitely_ underground. You get all sorts using this kind of material to build bunkers and the like from the 35th century on. Plus, the air in here tastes _off_ in that very specific underground way, bit like potting soil and tin, actually–”  
  
“Doctor.”  
  
Dimly, he registers that somewhere behind him, Rose is saying his name. She’s probably rolling her eyes again, too. She always does that when he licks things she thinks he shouldn’t. He’s preoccupied, though, too busy running his hands over the apparently seamless wall to really pay attention to the precise tone of her voice. “There’s got to be a seam somewhere, a panel, for maintenance or something,” he mutters, mostly to himself.  
  
Sure enough, once he crouches down a bit and runs his hands over the lowermost but of the wall, his hand catches on an uneven bit of metal. It’s practically invisible to the naked eye, and he spares a moment to be silently impressed with the design before digging his fingernails in under the edge of the lip and _yanking._ Thankfully, it springs loose without much effort – he seems to have been lucky enough to locate a maintenance panel, full of tangled wires and emitting a very soft humming noise.  
  
“Doctor, your _neck–_ ”  
  
By now the Doctor is only half-listening, as the larger part of his attention is consumed by the tangle of wires inside the wall panel. He can make out the workings of a complicated security system, and a complex power-supply network – early 42nd century, if he’s not mistaken – which is informative, but not exactly encouraging. Still, he’s cracked better with less, even if his fingers are positively itching for a sonic screwdriver he doesn’t have. “What about my neck?” he asks distractedly, while gingerly separating a few wires to get a peek at the circuitry behind them.  
  
Rose’s voice sounds caught between confusion and shock as she says, “It’s… _blinking._ ”  
  
“What?” He whips around to see Rose pointing in the general direction of his neck. One of his hands flies to the aforementioned area on reflex, and instead of the smooth, flat skin he expects to find, his fingers run across a hard, vaguely rectangular lump at the base of his neck. “ _What?_ ”  
  
Rose has gotten down and off her table and come over to him. “Turn around,” she says, and the Doctor obeys without thinking, still rubbing wonderingly at the back of his neck until he feels Rose’s fingers close over them and push them aside. Her own fingers replace his, and once more he’s hit by a wave of associative not-quite-memory. Her fingers gliding across the back of his neck while they sit side-by-side on a sofa, dancing up a bit higher to tangle in his hair, scratching angry red lines on his skin – down, down, down, from his neck all the way past his shoulder blades – as he thrusts into her.  
  
It takes every ounce of willpower he has to do nothing more than draw in a sharp breath – to stand straight and still and not spin around and gather her up in his arms – as she slowly traces over the strange protuberance and asks, “What is it?”  
  
“Don’t know,” he manages, weakly. “Can’t see it.” He twists his head around to look at her. “Do you…?”  
  
Rose looks surprised, then curious. “I don’t know. Check for me?” She turns, and he moves in to gently shift her hair away from the base of her neck. Sure enough, there is a red light blinking there, just beneath the skin –somewhat muted by the epidermis covering it, but still clearly visible, flashing gently on a two-second interval.  
  
“It’s a subcutaneous implant,” he breathes out, running a finger over the small patch of illuminated skin, made hard and unyielding by the implant just under the surface. It looks as though the chip is fairly small, probably less than a centimeter wide, and it’s placed just at the base of Rose’s neck, in roughly the same position as on his own.  
  
“What’s it for?” Rose’s voice sounds a little shaky, but as usual, she’s tamping down her fear quite admirably. “Can you tell why we’ve got them?”  
  
“Unfortunately, no.” He lets Rose’s hair fall back over her neck, and she turns to face him. “With the sonic screwdriver, sure, but short of cutting one of them out and taking a gander at it I haven’t the foggiest.” He sniffs and rubs a hand over the back of his own neck, fingers trailing across the hard bump of the implant at the base of his neck. “Tracker, probably. If I had a hat, I’d eat it if there wasn’t some sort of tracking device involved.”  
  
Rose’s face falls. “There goes the escape plan, then.”  
  
“Not necessarily,” he says, with a cheerfulness he doesn’t quite feel. “After all, I’ve got into their security system, here.” He makes his way back over to the wall and crouches down again pushing aside a few more wires and peering again at the circuitry that runs across the back of the maintenance box. He should be able to work with this, sonic or no sonic, if only he can _just_ – “Damn.” _Well, there goes that plan._  
  
“What is it?” Rose asks, sounding worried.  
  
“They’ve worked a retrocorrective feedback loop into the system.” He looks up at Rose just long enough to see that her expression is blank and uncomprehending. “Means that I _can_ fiddle with this panel to get the door open, but it won’t stay open for long.”  
  
“Wait.” Rose frowns, confusion written all over her face. “What door?”  
  
“Ah.” It only takes a moment of jiggery-pokery with one of the wires, and _then–_  
  
Rose gasps as a bit of wall about six feet from where the Doctor is crouching flickers out of existence, revealing a long, dark expanse of hallway beyond. “What was that?”  
  
“The security system relies on a camouflaged force field.” He manipulates the wire again, just so, and the wall flickers back into place. “That bit of wall, there – it’s not a real wall. Just looks like one.”  
  
“So you can get it open, but not for long.” He nods. “How long are we talking about, exactly?”  
  
The Doctor runs a hand through his hair absentmindedly as he does the calculations in his head. “Two seconds? Maybe three, but I doubt it. This sort of system’s a bit touchy.”  
  
“That’s long enough, though, isn’t it? It’s just a doorway. Three seconds – or two seconds, even – ought to be more than long enough to step through.”  
  
The Doctor shakes his head. “Sure, long enough to _step_ through – but not long enough for me to deactivate the power source _and_ get up and through the doorway. I’ve got to sustain the interruption in the current for this to work, and I’ve got to actually be touching these wires to do it.” He looks up at Rose. “ _But–_ ”  
  
“No.” Rose cuts him off before he can finish the thought. “No way. ‘M not leaving you here.”  
  
“Rose–”  
  
“Not gonna happen, Doctor.” Rose says firmly. “Besides, we’ve got these tracker things, don’t we?” She taps the back of her neck before gesturing vaguely in the direction of the force field. “What good would it do for me to swan off out there if whoever’s in charge of this place can just scoop me back up and dump me in here again?”  
  
The Doctor grimaces, more to himself than in response to Rose’s steadfast refusal. She does, after all, have a point. However, the part of him that’s always hated standing still for any significant amount of time is saying _get out get out get out_ , and there’s no way to do that while they’re standing around in this bizarre little room, waiting for something to happen.  
  
“What if,” he ventures tentatively, pausing to clear his throat before continuing. “What if I could do something about that?”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bless each and every one of you who've suffered so long waiting for an update. you're lovely, lovely readers.

Rose can remember, when she was a child — maybe around eight or nine — having a recurring dream.  
  
There wasn’t really anything remarkable about the dream, other than the fact that she had it (or variations of it) dozens and dozens of times over a period of a few months. But persistence made it memorable, and even now, over a decade later, Rose can still recall the way it went.  
  
The dream, when it came, always began in the back seat of a car.  
  
The being in a car was, in fact, a bit odd, as she’d spent very little time in cars as a child. Her mum had sold Pete’s old tin can before Rose could even walk — at the time, they’d needed the quick money far more than they’d needed the car. Instead, she’d grown up on buses and trains and the Tube, punctuated with the odd ride in Cousin Mo’s old boat of a car, which had scratchy cloth seats and always smelled faintly of cigarettes and vinegar.   
  
The car in the dream, however, was not Cousin Mo’s. It was clean and new, if never _moving_. It was always parked, motionless, though still gently purring the way that idling cars do. She can still remember, in a way that’s even more vivid than some of her memories of _real_ events, the exact color and texture of the car’s back seat — soft, buttery tan leather — and the smell of something rather like salt water drifting in through an open window. Rose has an idea that the car must have been parked at a beach, though the dream never quite got far enough for her to look out the window and confirm it.  
  
Things like the feel of leather under her fingers, or the rumbling hum of a car, or the smell of salt on the breeze — they still take her right back to that dream every time, with a sharp, almost tangible jolt of familiarity.  
  
And just now, it’s with that same sort of déjà vu that she finds herself staring at the Doctor.  
  
He’s still crouched by the open panel in the wall, one hand clutching a tangle of wires and the other braced against the wall. The last thing he said — _What if I could do something about that?_ — is still ringing in her ears, bracketed by the dizzying, unsettling sensation of sudden déjà vu.   
  
But unlike with her childhood dream, there’s nothing in the scene she’s looking at, nothing in the very small amount of unique sights or sounds or smells of the tiny white room that bring up particular images. There’s just an uncomfortable niggling sensation that there’s—  
  
 _More._  
  
Her head has stopped hurting, but her mind still feels a bit — adrift, or cotton-headed, the way it sometimes is after an overindulgent night, when the hangover’s beginning to wear off but the previous night’s memories are still fuzzy-edged and indistinct.  
  
Rose pushes past the disconcerting feeling, for the moment. There will — hopefully — be time to sober up later.  
  
“What do you mean, _do something about that?_ ” she asks. “Do something about what, exactly?”  
  
“ _Well—_ ” The Doctor tightens his grip on the snarled handful of wires and yanks, which produces a small shower of sparks and an unexpected cracking noise that makes Rose jump. “Might not have a sonic screwdriver just now, but I’m not so bad at hands-free.” He separates one long, thin red wire from the bundle and continues to pull at it, though a bit more gently, now. As it’s drawn out of the tangle he continues to carefully tug at the wire, wrapping the growing length of it around his hand.  
  
“Isn’t someone gonna _notice_ that you’re pullin’ the guts out of the security system?” Rose looks up at the ceiling. “Won’t there be cameras in here, or something?”  
  
The Doctor scrunches his nose in thought. “You know, that’s an excellent point.”  
  
He squints up at the ceiling, as if looking at it in a slightly different way will reveal something other than a smooth white surface inlaid with recessed lights. “Anyone up there?”  
  
When there’s no response, the Doctor sniffs and goes back to digging in the wall panel, apparently unbothered and unimpressed. “If anyone’s noticed, I’m sure they’ll be by to say hello soon enough.”  
  
Rose crouches down next to him. “So?”  
  
“So what?”  
  
“ _So,_ ” she says again, sing-song, “what do you mean, _do something about that_? Something about what?”  
  
“Oh!” The Doctor brightens. “Oh, I meant about these!” He reaches around to tap the back of his neck, at the spot where Rose knows a red light is still flashing. “Inconvenient little buggers, trackers are. But—“ He pauses, for a moment, to sort through the tangle of wires now dangling out of the wall panel, and selects a delicate green one. “Subcutaneous implants are, by nature, rather flimsy little things. Have to be, really, and long as the workmanship’s good it doesn’t usually matter. _But_ that works to our advantage, in this particular situation.”  
  
The Doctor thrusts the hand not holding the green wire into the electrical panel and starts rooting around in earnest. After a moment, there is a loud _pop_ , followed by a fusillade of muted, crackling snaps that remind her of the sound a firework makes when it’s fizzling out.  
  
“They — whoever _they_ are — have been quite careless with their electrical system.” He twirls the green wire between his fingers, looking eminently pleased with himself. “I can route a bit of current through this wire here. Not enough to hurt anything or anyone — not even enough to divert any meaningful amount of power from other systems — but more than enough to short out these chips.”   
  
“Through our skin?” Rose asks, trying not to sound as skeptical as she feels. “Won’t that hurt?”  
  
“Course not.” The Doctor shrugs, and his eyes skitter away, avoiding hers. “Well, a bit. Like a pinprick, really. Totally safe.”  
  
“Mm-hmm.” Rose says, dubious — and not afraid to let it show. “Doesn’t change the fact that I’m still not keen on leaving you here.”  
  
The Doctor makes a non-committal humming noise that could mean anything from _you’re being ridiculous, Rose_ to _yes, yes, I completely agree with whatever it is you’ve just said._ Then he pulls the hand that’d been rooting around in the wall panel out of the wire-filled tangle and brings it to his temple, tapping lightly. “The TARDIS is here, somewhere,” he says, quietly. “I can _feel_ her. Couldn’t, when we—” He clears his throat, sounding uncomfortable, before risking a glance at Rose and plunging on. “Anyways, she’s here. And without her, there’s not much we can do except sit round here and wait for someone to bring us a room service menu. Which I hardly think’ll be anytime soon.”  
  
Rose lets out a _whoosh_ of frustrated breath. “I don’t like this,” she mutters. “I don’t like any of it.”  
  
When she looks back at the Doctor, he looks almost pained. “I’m sorry,” he says, in a tone that he ordinarily reserves for people who have just received terrible news about a family member, or aliens who have just had their planet overthrown. “I really am.”  
  
She feels, ridiculously, like reaching over and giving him a hug. “Not your fault we’re stuck here,” she says. “I mean, given your driving, ‘s probably your fault we’re here in the first place—”  
  
“Oi—”  
  
Rose grins, despite herself — despite everything — and keeps on. “—but the chips aren’t. The cell isn’t. Least, not as far as I can tell.”  
  
She expects the Doctor to make a smart remark, or to smile at her in that _way_ he has, the one that seems to incorporate his whole body. Instead, he stays unsettlingly quiet, fiddling with the wire in his hand and only offering a half-hearted quirk of his lips.  
  
“So you’ll go, then?” He’s uncharacteristically nice enough to phrase it as a question, but really — what else is there to do?  
  
Rose puts a hand to the back of her neck, to rub against the hard, foreign bump there. “Guess I don’t really have a choice, yeah?”  
  
If possible, the Doctor looks even more glum. “Just — lift up your hair, one more time,” he says, gesturing vaguely in the direction of her neck. “Don’t want to catch it with a spark when I short out the chip.”  
  
Rose complies, turning away and lifting her hair away from her neck. “Just don’t go catching my hair on fire, you he—”  
  
Before she can get the last word out, there is a bright, fizzing flash of pain at the base of her neck. It’s brief, and hardly the worst sort of pain she’s ever felt —but the unexpectedness of it knocks the breath from her lungs, just for a moment.  
  
“Sorry,” the Doctor says mildly. “Thought it’d be better if you weren’t bracing for it.”  
  
Rose turns around to glare at him, doing her level best to duplicate her mother’s very best glower.  
  
The Doctor, to his credit, has the good sense to at least _appear_ contrite. “That ought to sort your chip, at least temporarily,” he offers, rather weakly, as he goes about the business of tucking the green wire back into the wall panel. “It’ll have mucked up any tracking software they have installed, at the bare minimum.”   
  
Rose keeps on scowling while she rubs gingerly at the now-tender spot on the back of her neck, wincing when the contact produces more pain than expected. “What am I looking for, exactly?”  
  
“Well, the TARDIS would be lovely, of course,” he says, with the most genuine smile that Rose has seen from him since she woke up.  
  
“Don’t have my key, though,” she reminds him. “Couldn’t get in even if I found it.”  
  
The Doctor nods, grimacing. “Our belongings, then. A way out would be nice. Clues about what we’re doing here, and what _they’re_ doing here, whoever _they_ are, and—”  
  
“I know all of that, you berk,” Rose interrupts. “I meant more like, is there anythin’ specific I should look for in this kind of — what’d you call it, a bunker? Are the exits only gonna be in a certain place, or something?”  
  
The Doctor, after flashing her a brief expression of pride, proceeds to pour out a deluge of technobabble, mostly about things that don’t sound helpful at all, like metamolecular alloy partition density and oxygen capacity in long-term-use subterranean facilities.  
  
“Right,” she finally says, cutting him off somewhere between relative air quality and general space allocation practices. “I’ll just muddle through like usual, then.”  
  
The Doctor looks miffed, but he doesn’t argue, either.  
  
After a few more moments of rooting around inside the wall, the Doctor directs her to stand in front of the bit of false wall that serves as their cell door.  
  
“Remember, this won’t stay open long,” he says, alternately glancing at the wall panel, then at her, and then back at the wall panel. “Two, two and a half seconds, max.”  
  
“I’ll step quickly.”  
  
“You’ll have to,” the Doctor mutters darkly, more to the panel than to her.  
  
“Don’t get into too much trouble while I’m gone,” Rose says, in a voice that’s much sunnier than she feels.  
  
The Doctor looks up, then, and smiles — a _real_ smile, big and bright enough to make her feel like the room’s somehow gotten brighter. “And you’ll be back in one piece, yeah?”  
  
Rose grins, and the brightness in her voice when she speaks is real, this time. “Yes, sir.”  
  
(There’s that déjà vu again. At least it makes sense, this time).  
  
The Doctor nods and smiles again, but it’s tighter, now, thin-lipped and tense. “Right. On three—”   
  
Once she’s through the doorway on _three_ , Rose whips around as fast as she can, hoping she can catch one more glimpse of the Doctor before the false wall comes up again, and—  
  
There’s only enough time to see his face for a second. Rose can see that his eyes are wide, worried and that his brows are drawn down and together — but there’s no time to read the expression, no time to pull any meaning from it , before the wall flickers back into place.  
  
\---  
  
Rose stands there, staring at the wall-that-isn’t-a-wall, for much longer than she’d like to admit. It’s not white, not on this side — the illusion is of dull metal sheeting rather than gleaming white paint. The projection is intricately detailed, complete with rusty pockmarks and artificial dents.  
  
She finds herself thinking, with a detachment she doesn’t quite feel, that for something made out of light, it’s not very pretty.  
  
It’s only when she steps back and away from the ugly, illusory wall that she realizes it’s hardly the only unpleasant-looking thing around.  
  
Their cell appears to be at the end of a dead-end hallway. The corridor, while just as high-ceilinged as the cell itself, is lined in the same kind of dull, tarnished metal that the projected door displays. There is no clean, white light here — the recessed bulbs in the ceiling look old and lower-tech, and their light is yellow and fairly dim.  
  
At the far end of the hallway, the corridor splits, to the left and the right.  
  
To the left there are three doors — all metal and thick, with complicated-looking panels set into the places where handles would ordinarily be. The door-lined passage is even more dimly lit than the one Rose is standing in — three of the five recessed lights in the ceiling are out, and a fourth is flickering on and off, casting eerie shafts of light into the gloomy metal space. That corridor ends a few yards past the third door, in a blank expanse of dull metal wall.  
  
To the right, there are no doors. There is only a long, slightly more well-lit metal-lined hallway that seems to split again some ways down.  
  
Rose goes right.  
  
Three right turn, two left turns, and one unsettling noise — something wobbly and echoing, like a thin piece of sheet metal being shaken later — she finds herself facing a dead end.  
  
The cold metal floor is starting to take a toll on Rose’s bare feet, and the eerie, unpopulated maze of corridors is beginning to put her teeth on edge. The dead end, after a long stretch of hallways with no windows, doors, or signs of life, is exasperating, and she’s just about to turn on her freezing heel and try her luck in the last corridor back—  
  
And then the wall _flickers._  
  
It’s not quite the same sort of flicker she’d seen when the Doctor manipulated the door to their cell. It’s longer, for one thing, long enough to give her a glimpse of the space beyond the false door — a brightly lit room full of long, white counters.   
  
She counts the next ten flickers standing there in the hall, parses them out and sees how long each one lasts.  
  
On the eleventh one, she risks stretching a hand out into the apparently empty space of the doorway, bracing herself to meet a barrier of some kind — or worse, an electric shock — and nearly pitches forward too far when her fingers only meet empty air.  
  
On the twelfth flicker, she squares her shoulders, braces herself again, and rushes across the empty threshold.  
  
The room is, indeed, brightly lit and full of long counters. The walls and ceilings are bright white, like the walls of the cell, and the counters are covered in bits of scientific-looking detritus — a beaker and a burner here, a petri dish there. In fact, Rose rather thinks it looks like someone’s picked up her Year 9 science classroom, added a thousand years of scientific advancement, and dumped it this room.  
  
She’s hunched over one of the long counters, wondering if there’s anything she can summon up from her long-suppressed memories of science classes at school that might help figure out the mystery of this place, when a shaky female voice says, from somewhere behind her, “Don’t move.”  
  
Rose risks disobeying the order to turn towards the source of the voice, coming from the other side of the nearest white counter. It belongs to a petite, dark-skinned humanoid woman with garishly dyed hair — green and red and blue and purple, all layered into black — wearing a lab coat and large eyeglasses. The woman’s lab coat, which presumably had been white at one point, is streaked with dirt and what Rose thinks might be blood, and there is a large crack in one of the lenses of her glasses.  
  
Those, however, are details she notices later — because the first thing Rose sees is the gun in the other woman’s hand.  
  
“What are you doing here?” The woman’s voice wobbles as she speaks, squeaking on the higher inflections and breaking on the lower ones. “How did you get in?”  
  
Rose takes a deep breath and holds her hands up in front of her, in an attempt to appear as non-threatening as possible. “Let’s not do anythin’ rash, all right? ‘M not armed.” She waves her hands a bit, and steps out from behind the counter and into the aisle, so that the woman can see her very much unarmed person. “See? No weapons. Let’s just…talk.”  
  
The other woman’s hands are still shaking — and especially, Rose notes with worry, the one wrapped around the gun. “You’re one of the subjects, aren’t you? I knew we couldn’t keep this contained for long. Not with the Ood gone, and the conduits acting like this—” The woman’s voice breaks again on the last word, her tone veering dangerously close to hysterical.  
  
“You’ve got Ood around here?” Rose asks. _There’s something a bit familiar, at least._  
  
The woman laughs. It’s a hollow, unnerving sort of laugh, the kind that doesn’t have anything to do with humor, and it plants a wriggling, uncomfortable seed of worry in the pit of Rose’s stomach. “Not anymore, we don’t.”  
  
When the other woman doesn’t make any further attempts to elaborate — or to move from their stand-off — Rose hazards a tiny step forwards.  
  
“Look—” she starts, halting quickly when the woman steps forward to match her, gun hand still shaking violently. “I’m unarmed,” she tries again, doing her level best to look the other woman in the eye instead of focusing on the gun, and on how it’s wobbling unsettlingly with every shake of its owner’s body. “All I want is to know where I am, and why my friend and I woke up in a freezin’ white box. So the gun is…really unnecessary.”  
  
The gun comes down then, just a bit, and the thought of lunging forward to try and grab it flits across Rose’s mind. “Oh my God,” the woman breathes out. “You’re from the group experience trial.”  
  
“The _what?_ ” Rose tries to sound as firm as possible, even knowing that the gun in the other woman’s hand doesn’t really bode well for her chances of getting straight answers. “What trial? What are you talking about?”  
  
The woman’s hands are still shaking, the gun bobbing up and down in an increasingly worrying way as its owner takes in shallow, panicked breaths. “Your trial partner — is he awake?”  
  
“Why?” Rose tries, with a bit more success this time, to put more steel into her voice. “What do you want with him?”  
  
“You came here in a spaceship,” the woman says. She doesn’t offer anything further — just keeps staring at Rose with wild eyes and shaking hands.  
  
“And? What do you want with it?” _What have you **done** with it?_  
  
“I want,” the woman says unsteadily, “to get _out_ of here.” 


	7. Chapter 7

The Doctor is trying very, _very_ hard not to stare at the blank patch of false wall through which Rose has disappeared.  
  
The problem is that there’s really not much else to _do._ He’s spent the time since Rose left inspecting their prison from top to bottom, and it’s done nothing except further confirm the few things that he already knew – that they’re most likely underground, that there is a tracking chip of some kind flashing away in the back of his neck, and that they’re probably somewhere in the early 42nd century.  
  
Unfortunately, even if this was the most fascinating room in the universe, he’s not sure it would be enough to distract him from _remembering._  
  
The new catalogue of memories now interfiled in his brain seems somehow cast into sharp focus by the stark white of the room – the intangible made more vivid, more enticing, by the complete lack of color or personality in his tangible situation.  
  
_Rose is standing in the shade of a shabby white tent, pitched over a long row of tables in a dusty field. The tables are a case study in ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’ – spread thick with knickknacks and thingamabobs of every shape and size. Brass spittoons and chipped china are interspersed with baseball cards and antique jewelry, and all of it is hawked by enthusiastic dealers ready and willing to haggle over price.  
  
Rose has picked up half a dozen different pieces to consider – mostly jewelry, but also a few little curios unique to 22nd-century America – quadricentennial pins and buttons, that sort of thing. The thing she handles the longest, though, is a silly little mug, the novelty kind that she could’ve found in a pound shop back in her own time.  
  
She holds it up for him to see and smiles, tongue between her teeth. “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor,” she reads off the side of the cup, laughing. “This ought to be yours, then!”  
  
He leaves her behind for a moment to sample the deep-fried bananas at the stall across the way, but Rose catches up to him while he’s still in line; she wraps her arms around his waist from behind and goes up on her tiptoes to set her chin on his shoulder.  
  
The air smells like salt. It’s not sea-salt, not here in the landlocked Midwest, but kettle-corn salt, with that ever-so-slightly-sweet edge to it. There’s a bit of dust threaded through it as well, producing that unique sort of carnival atmosphere that you often get at fairs and festivals held outdoors – dirt and fat and hot sugar, all wrapped up in candy-colored tents and banners.  
  
Rose, though, still smells like the TARDIS. She leans in and presses a kiss to the side of his neck, and he can smell it in her hair – metal, stardust, engine grease, the not-quite-stale, not-quite-fresh air of the ship’s enclosed spaces.  
  
**But none of that happened.**_  
  
He rebukes himself, silently. _Not real, not real, not real. None of it was real._  
  
If Rose remembered, too, then maybe, but – _no._  
  
_That’s not a road you want to go down, Doctor._  
  
The sudden frisson of crackling electricity, rather than his own mental rebukes, is what _actually_ keeps him from meandering into hypotheticals he ought to leave alone. It’s a small, almost imperceptible change, not something a human could’ve picked up on, and then the bit of false wall that hides the door flickers – once, twice, three times – and disappears.  
  
The Doctor is in front of the door in half a second, and Rose is there, by all appearances intact and unhurt, and for a moment his hearts practically _soar._  
  
Then he sees that her hands are up, and that there’s a woman behind her with a gun.  
  
“As you can see,” Rose says, all false sweetness and light, “I’ve brought us some company.” In lieu of any gesture which would require her to put her hands down, Rose jerks her heads backwards in the other woman’s direction. “We’ve had a lovely chat on the way here. This is Karelle. Karelle, meet the Doctor. Doctor, meet Karelle.”  
  
He can’t help it – her brightness, false as it may be, is as infectious as always, and it paints a grin across his face. “My pleasure, Karelle, splendid to meet you. Now, if it’s not too much trouble, could you please put that gun down?”  
  
The woman – Karelle – is a bit shorter than Rose, and has to raise herself up on her tiptoes to peer over Rose’s shoulder and look square at the Doctor. Her expression is scared and wary, unbalanced by his and Rose’s cheerfulness. “She’s been asking me to do that the whole way here. Why should I?”  
  
He shrugs, and Karelle visibly tenses. “As you can see, I’m armed with nothing but questions. Why should you need it?”  
  
There is a long, drawn moment of silence. Karelle looks at the floor, then the ceiling, then the floor again, her hand holding the gun trembling the whole time. Rose looks him straight in the eye, her own bright and trusting, and he can see her mind working, one step behind his but only just, trying to think what they might do if she refuses–  
  
–and then the other woman lowers the gun.  
  
“Fine,” she says. “I guess you’re right. But don’t try anything.” She clumsily holsters the weapon at her belt in a display that’s clearly _meant_ to be intimidating, but utterly fails. Her fingers on the weapon are shaky and unpracticed, fiddling with a holster that’s a inexpertly attached to her belt, ever so slightly askew.  
  
Rose lowers her hands and lets out a _whoosh_ of held breath. “Lovely. Now we’re here, maybe you could get on with tellin’ us what sort of test subjects we are, exactly?”  
  
The Doctor shoots Rose a sharp, cautionary look, but she only has eyes for the other woman. Karelle, for her part, is still fidgeting nervously, wringing her hands. “You’d have to _promise–_ ” her voice cracks a bit, on the last, “–that you’ll help me get out of here.”  
  
“Oh, we’ve got to help _you?_ ” Rose asks, heated. “After you’ve kidnapped us and run experiments on us? That’s a bit rich.”  
  
“Karelle,” the Doctor interjects, in the most soothing, genial tone he can muster, “I promise, if you can answer our questions and get us to our ship, then we’ll _all_ get out of here.”  
  
Karelle worries her lip with her teeth for a moment, considering, without actually looking at either of them. “Fine. But we walk and talk, yeah?” She reaches into a pocket and pulls out a thin white card. “Follow me.”  
  
Then Karelle reaches out and touches her card to the doorframe. There is a soft pinging noise, rather like a quiet doorbell, and then the lights in the white room go out, leaving them standing in an eerie half-dark.  
  
—  
  
Karelle leads them out of the white room and out into the surprisingly dark, faintly damp-smelling hallway. _Definitely underground._ Though there are no signs or indicating marks on any of the doors or walls, she walks briskly and surely through a winding maze of left turns, right turns, and shortcuts through badly lit and ever-so-slightly-shabby rooms. None of the labyrinth even slightly resembles the white room where he and Rose had been kept – this maze is all dull, plain metal and flickering lights.  
  
“It’s a bit… _musty_ in here, isn’t it?” he says, to no one in particular, as they step over the threshold of yet another dark, gloomy metal room. This one looks like it was once a barracks or sleeping quarters; bunks line the walls, and there are still personal effects on some of the beds and side tables. There’s a faulty holophoto player still looping on one of those tables, beaming a rotating series of dim pictures into the air. The color is off and the power source is clearly failing, because these stills of someone’s family holiday are tinged with green and faintly flickering.  
  
“Bit _creepy,_ more like,” Rose mutters from beside him. “Feels like something’s gonna jump out at me any second now.”  
  
_Yes…about that._ He can still feel the faint telepathic traces in his mind, though they’re fading now, no longer the bright, sloppy smudges he could sense so vividly just as they’d been waking up. “About those questions we’ve got, Karelle,” he says, friendly as he can manage. “Could we get to those now?”  
  
Karelle, at the other end of the room, speaks without turning around to look at them. “What is it you want to know?” She doesn’t stop to wait for a follow-up question – instead, she starts fiddling with the door at the end of the room. The slim white card that she’s used to open all of the facility’s doors so far appears not to be working on this particular one. The door is making an angry little _dinging_ noise every time she touches it to the frame, and when he moves up closer to her, the Doctor can see that her face is wrinkled with frustration.  
  
“Where we _are_ would be nice,” Rose throws out. She’s stopped to look at the holophoto player, which is currently displaying a still of a picturesque little reptilian family on holiday somewhere sunny, “And why you’re apparently the _only_ person we’ve seen in this whole place?”  
  
Karelle’s hands suddenly fumble on her card key. “ _Shit,_ ” she swears, as the card clatters to the floor. “Shit, shit, _shit._ We’ll have to go out through the aerie to get to the dock.”  
  
“D’you maybe want to answer my question before we go wherever that is?” Rose quips, eyes still fixed on the flickering holophotos.  
  
The other woman turns on her heel, away from the far door, and stalks back through the room to the exit, spitting out words as she goes.  
  
“I’m the only one you’ve seen because I’m the only one that’s left.”  
  
—  
  
From the barracks, they head back out into the maze of corridors. Karelle moves so quickly that it’s difficult to try and pepper her with questions; there’s an urgency to her movements that wasn’t there before. The Doctor has a feeling that this route is taking them closer to the surface, closer to the bunker’s entrance – the air is getting less damp, the smell in the hallways slightly less musty.  
  
Rose, of course, isn’t letting the pace stop her from trying more questions. “You _still_ haven’t said,” she huffs, as they scrabble up a flight of concrete stairs, “where we are, or what happened to us.”  
  
“We’re at Trial Site 22532,” Karelle replies, clipped and professional. “Roxconn Corporation, owned and operated.”  
  
“So you do what here, then? Medical experiments? Tests?”  
  
The Doctor can’t help interjecting, at this point. “Oh, trial sites do _all_ kinds of things, don’t they? You’ve carte blanche for pretty much anything in those more ‘business-friendly’ systems, hmmm? I’d hazard a guess we’re in one of them.”  
  
Rose looks vaguely appalled, though, to her credit, not the least bit surprised. “All right, then. The experiment?”  
  
“You were inducted into our ongoing organic virtuality experiment as participants in our debut group experience trial,” Karelle says mildly. It rather sounds as though she’s reading off of a cue card. “You gave your consent to participate, as far as I know. I wasn’t actually involved in running your particular trial.”  
  
The Doctor rather doubted that he – or Rose – had consented to any such thing, but his memory of the time in between Krop Tor and here is still quite distressingly fuzzy.  
  
“Yeah, but what’s that _mean?_ ” Rose, he realizes, is posing this question as much to him as she is to Karelle. “Inducing headaches? ‘Cause my head’s _still_ sorta killin’ me.”  
  
Karelle stops for a moment, then, and turns to Rose. “You don’t remember anything, then?” She asks, with a glimmer of what sounds like professional curiosity. “No recall of the trial experience?”  
  
“You’d have to tell me what this ‘trial experience’ _was,_ first,” Rose says, dubious. “All I remember is minding my own business on our ship one minute, then wakin’ up in your mad science laboratory with my head on fire the next.”  
  
The other woman sniffs, as if unimpressed. “Hm. Pity.” For a moment she looks almost… _normal,_ for lack of a better word – simply a scientist assessing a test subject, rather than the harried, nervous woman who’d made them promise to get her out of here.  
  
Then a _shriek_ comes from behind the door at the top of the staircase, and Karelle _jumps._  
  
“Well, _that_ sounds promising,” the Doctor can’t help chiming in.  
  
The hunted look is back on Karelle’s face. “I was hoping,” she mumbles, “to have avoided going through here, but the other exterior exit’s blocked. This’ll be the only way to the dock, the only way to your ship–” She draws in a breath before pulling the white key card out of her pocket again, touching it to the doorframe. “–but you may want to cover your ears.”  
  
He’s about to ask _why_ when the soft _ping_ announcing the door opening is promptly drowned out by the sound of a thousand chirping voices.  
  
This door, unlike most of the others in the dark, damp labyrinth, opens into a massive, high-ceilinged room – likely as high as they could possibly manage underground – and from that high ceiling there dangles a veritable forest of wire mesh cages, filled with… _birds._  
  
At least, they _look_ like birds. They’re avian, for sure, with wings and feathers, but these creatures certainly aren’t of Earth. They’re all a bit smaller than most Earth species, for one, more petite and delicate-looking – and for another, these birds all _glow._  
  
The overall effect is that the room rather looks like it’s lit by enormous, twittering fireflies. The ceiling is a mass of glowing, cheeping birds, glittering in the air and filling the room with light. It is, in fact, such a dazzling picture that it takes the Doctor a moment or two to realize that they are not only speaking with their voices, but their _minds._  
  
“Those,” he says, just loud enough to be heard over the chatter, “are _not_ ordinary birds.”  
  
“Oh, but they are gorgeous, aren’t they?” Rose says, from beside him.  
  
“They’re also,” he says, with growing distaste for the picture beginning to coalesce in his mind, “our fellow test subjects. Isn’t that right, Karelle?”  
  
Karelle, for her part, is clinging to the doorframe with one hand, the other covering one of her ears. “Yes,” she replies, hesitant, “yes, that’s correct. They’re indigenous to this planet, you see, native symbionts, and they have just such _fantastic_ abilities that we had to test the limits of their applications–”  
  
_”Test the limits, hm?”_ He can’t keep the scorn out of his voice any longer. “Is that what you call hooking them up to your test subjects and forcing them to give us _good dreams?”_  
  
_Free free free free free,_ the birds are chirping, above them. _Please please please please._  
  
“No.” The Doctor cuts Karelle off before she can even open her mouth to contradict him. “No, you didn’t want to just _test limits_ , did you? You wanted to market this. Market _them._ ”  
  
Rose turns towards him, confusion written all over her face. “What do you mean?”  
  
His lips are curled in disgust. “The birds – they’re telepathic symbionts. Like a clownfish and a sea anemone, only they probably provide telepathic… _encouragement_ of some kind to their partner organism, instead of eating little beasties off your back, like the clownfish might. What they’ve done–” He points at Karelle, who is again refusing to meet anyone’s eyes, “Is redirect that. Send those _good vibes_ in another direction, to us up here in need of a good dream. All your cares thrown away, all your fondest wishes granted!”  
  
“That’s about right, isn’t it? Did I miss anything?” The other woman is still silent, her eyes fixed on the floor, her fists balled up at her sides. “And if I know the kinds of companies behind these trial sites, what they’ll really want is to _sell_ this. Monetize it. What’s the pitch?” He positively _snarls_ the question. _“Dreams Come True?”_  
  
Karelle seems to wither under his ire, slumping, dejected, into the doorframe. “It’s not like that,” she mutters weakly, in a tone that suggests she does, in fact, know that it is _just_ like that. “They’re hardly sentient. It’s just what comes naturally to them! They _like_ making people happy!”  
  
“They’ve got no _choice,_ ” the Doctor spits out. “You’re _using_ them.”  
  
“Why would you even _need_ this?” Rose interjects, equal parts disgust and confusion. “Haven’t you lot got virtual reality, or anything like that? You must have, by now.”  
  
Karelle’s face perks up – expressing, for a change, an emotion other than fear. “Oh, but that’s so artificial,” she says. “This is _natural!_ This is an _organic_ experience, shaped by your own mind and by a biological process, not by some line of zeroes and ones!”  
  
Rose makes an incredulous noise that sounds like half scoff, half giggle. “So you’re sayin’ that this was supposed to be…what? _All-natural_ wish fulfillment?”  
  
“Of course!” The woman’s eyes are positively shining now. “Of course it was! We – none of us here – none of us ever wanted to hurt _anyone_ , or anything–”  
  
“And what _happened_ to the others here, Karelle?” The Doctor snaps, feeling his patience finally worn thin. “Why don’t you tell us?”  
  
She finally slides down the rest of the doorframe, her head falling to her hands as she slumps into a crouch on the ground. “They never–”  
  
Karelle’s voice breaks off, hanging in the moment she needs to gather herself and continue, and in that moment Rose catches his eyes with a look that’s bubbling over with questions – _how_ and _why_ and _what does this all mean, exactly_ , questions that make his hearts twists just thinking about how to answer them. Then the other woman draws in a shaky breath, collecting herself, and says, quietly–  
  
“They never woke up.”


End file.
